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The available technology would have been the stuff of -- even beyond -- pure science fiction when many of us reading this Forum were in high school or maybe even in college.
My dad always had a darkroom. That red light on the ceiling was a childhood mystery. Fact was, the darkroom (which he could never afford to keep up to spec) doubled as our 50's and early 60's bomb shelter -- you know, the safe place to be when the big one exploded over your city.
My kids inherited their grandparents' (both sides) darkroom equipment, all of which has long since made it to flea markets and landfills. It always seemed like trying to pick up satellite radio on very expensive and risky crystal sets, so we just gave up.
And yet, I much prefer an old letterpress print production to anything a computer can put out -- a letterpress printer knows about the tactile "kiss," the measure of pressure of type against paper -- but I'm going to bet that old Ansel Adams would have had a good time with digitals and Photoshop. He knew very well how to "photoshop" an image in the darkroom, and the myth to the contrary has caused a lot of frustration for would-be shutterbugs.
The days of shooting a 36-image roll -- or eight, on vacation -- and hoping against hope that there would be a few keepers when the prints came back weeks later from wherever they came back from are over, for better or worse. I have a whole lot of film photos that I wouldn't trade for gold, but within a year of acquiring digital, I was completely Borg'ed into submission. Resistance was futile.
On the other hand, I started with Macs and stuck with them, and look -- new Macs can now run all the Windows/PC programs, assuming the users want to take a step back in time and performance. The good wins out, with patience.
Nothing very classic or romantic about this on-a-budget dial-up connection, though.
And the beat goes on.
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